Game 158, Rangers at Mariners
Dave · September 28, 2005 at 6:51 pm · Filed Under Mariners
Joel Pineiro vs Chris Young.
1. Ichiro, RF
2. Betancourt, SS
3. Ibanez, DH
4. Sexson, 1B
5. Beltre, 3B
6. Dobbs, LF – yuck
7. Lopez, 2B
8. Choo, CF
9. Rivera, C
Half the line-up was in Tacoma in July.
Comments
140 Responses to “Game 158, Rangers at Mariners”
As an absurdly loyal and frightenly addicted M’s fan, I’ve watched alot of bad baseball over the last 2 years. Access to MLB TV, MLB Extra Innings, Fox Sports SW (with my least favorite broadcast team), and Gameday when necessary provides far too much access to sordid viewing. Even so, I don’t recall a game this pathetic.
#100: My theory: TB’s players aren’t doing it for Lou. They are sick of every Boston and NY game in the Trop being an “away” game for TB (due to noisy Boston and NY fans who show up in larger numbers than their own fans) and want to stick it to the league the only way they can, now that they have a chance.
FWIW I had a Rubio’s fish taco today (actually, 3) – paradise! too bad I had to go to Salt Lake City to get them…
In case anyone’s lost count, that’s our 3rd baserunner since the 1st inning
#86– the Freep had an interesting piece about Griffey helping to get the Tigers’ no.1 pick signed
File this under the Hmmm Files,… the Devil Rays know Piniella is gone next year but the players are still playing their ass of for him. The players know Grover will be back but are just turning over.
hmmm. At the end of ’02 the Ms played like crap for Lou. End of ’03 the Ms played like crap for Melvin. End of ’04 the M’s played like crap for Melvin. End of ’05 the M’s play like crap….
105# Where is Mulder when you need him?
On another note, Choo has looked so bad at the plate, he seems to have taken cues from Spezio. Did anyone see Choo in Tacoma this year? Is he really this bad?
Me likey Meche in Relief, but no likey in start!
#106: Choo had an .816 OPS in Tacoma in 429 AB’s. I doubt he’s as bad as his 18 MLB AB’s make him look.
Beltre is phoning it all in at this point.
8 K’s for the M’s but just 2 BB. The Rangers aren’t that good. It seems to show “let’s just get this over with”.
#109: No one told Beltre’s glove he was phoning it all in.
And with the tying run now in the on deck circle, the “Saves” rule once again rears its ugly head.
Should we start calling Hansen the Pinch Misser now?
Reading the TNT article from the other day, I’m encouraged by this team despite tonite’s showing. Sure, it’s easy to point to poor performances and claim that so-and-so is mailing it in. But I don’t believe Beltre is that type of person. Is he tired and lapsing back into his bad habits of swinging at the low and away pitch? Looks like it, but I wouldn’t assume that it’s because he doesn’t care. And if the whole team is tired by 9:00 p.m. from showing up at the ballpark early and working on fundamentals with the coaches as the TNT article intimates, then that’s an okay excuse for me.
162 games in 180 odd some days is a pretty rigorous sports schedule that isn’t repeated anywhere else that I can see.
Rusty, that was Finneganesque.
Finnegan? When I refer to an article from the Tacoma News Tribune? That’s an interesting association Dave in Palo Alto. I just get sick of some of the negativism on this board. That doesn’t make me Bob Finnegan.
Grover must be schizoid, split personality, dellusional or what I don’t know…. good: Morse pinch hit for Choo (Choo has looked really bad at the plate); bad: pinch hit for Rivera (Rivera has looked good at the plate while Hansen has looked horrid). What a predictable 9th inning. The Rangers can make 10 errors and still win against the M’s. I predict sweep again.
Can the M’s get to 95 loses this year! I am sort of hoping they will because the closer they get to the loss mark last year the more they have to realize they made a ass-half effort last year to make the team better.
In the “At Least They’re Not As Pathetic As The Devil Rays” file, comes this note from the Associated Press:
In Mark Hendrickson and Scott Kazmir, the Devil Rays have two 10-game winners for the first time in club history.
According to the ESPN game recap, the official attendance tonight was 20,723 (43.4% of capacity)… the lowest ever at Safeco.
The park tonight was so empty I took the girl (18 months old now) for a walk around the upper deck concourse, and I didn’t have to hold her hand lest she went into a crowd and vanished. It was sparse.
And this line from Dave makes me feel really old:
The best prospects in next years draft at the moment are… Kyle Drabek (Doug’s kid)
Doug Drabek’s kid is old enough to be draft. Oy gevalt.
87. I’m moving back to NY during the Christmas holiday and will definitely keep an eye on the situation. The Mets organization has a history of political backstabbing dating back to the 1970s, when original owners the Payson family and infamous chairman M. Donald Grant (the jerk who traded Tom Seaver) battled for control while the team played like a bunch of Sslly Leaguers. Of course, if Peterson is in favor of bringing Braden Looper back next year, then he should be fired, regardless of what Bernazard’s doing behind the scenes.
So the Padres win the NL West, eh? Good for them. Now imagine what Jim Rome will say tomorrow. Probably something along the lines of “Congratulations – now go lose seven in a row and disappear from our collective minds. Years from now, my children will ask me who won the NL West in 2005 and I will say, ‘Nobody.’ The Padres didn’t win, everybody else just lost.”
Since this is a Mariners blog, did anybody see that Ichiro is suing a Taiwanese company for illegal use of his image? If not, here’s the story: http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news;_ylt=AmbOMjZw4fGpK4j6MOee5dgn0bYF?slug=ap-mariners-ichiro-lawsuit&prov=ap&type=lgns
I am out.
120-
Dang it, I was about to post that.
Mariner attendance is just over 2.6 million, with 4 games to go. They’re not gonna hit 2.8 million, and crowds of 20,000…uh-oh.
I bet the M’s are now regretting that they made Safeco so big. 🙂
I think it’s more like they are regretting they made the team so crappy.
Wonder if tomorrow will go below 20K. Or if it will go there in April 2006.
They still have the 3rd highest attendance in the AL despite fielding a horrible (and boring) team for more than 2 years running. Simply put, the customers continue to buy a bad product. As long as the team offers enough Edgar giveaways, Little League promos, and ’95 nostalgia nights (soon-to-be replaced by 2001 nostalgia!), they will always draw 2+ million fans a year. And if the team happens to approach .500 again, it’ll be back to 3+ million in attendance and fat city for the owners.
By the way, Tampa Bay and Seattle now share the exact same record: 67-91.
Fourth in the AL, actually- 13th in MLB. (They’ll probably jump a couple spots the last couple of weeks, but I don’t think they’ll hit top 10.)
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/attendance?sort=home_total&year=2005&seasonType=2
Keep in mind in the AL KC, Detroit and TB are pitiful, and have been for a while, and the White Sox and Oakland have NEVER drawn well.
Baltimore’s been awful for far longer than the M’s (since 1998), and they aren’t too far behind Seattle in attendance.
#125: If I remember correctly, this morning’s paper said there were 25,000 seats remaining for tomorrow’s game, so they should announce attendance of at least around 23,000. The number announced hasn’t been a true turnstile count since the 1994 strike. The team knows the real number, even if they don’t tell us. Bad news: empty seats don’t buy expensive concessions.
It’ll be interesting to see how many people leave after Dan Wilson’s one inning Friday night.
#130: They’ll stay for the hat trick and the hydro races.
I guess my big highlight is totally selfish.
So here is a little story for those that want to read it.
In the bottom, of the 8th with Adrian Beltre up, he hit a foul ball that went back, hit the second tier and come down in the seats. I tracked the ball and knew it would be close. As the ball arched down I think it hit the empty seats behind me and then hit the ground. It rolled right behind my seat. As other hands came into my view, I reached down and grabbed it. I had “caught” a foul ball. I raised it in the air because my brain told me “You raise the ball in the air to show everyone looking”. I don’t think anyone was really looking.
As the ball had gotten closer I had the thought of “don’t get too excited, someone else always gets the ball”. I have been going to baseball games for 16 years. I have been right next to the guy that got the ball like 3 or 4 times. “Someone else always gets the ball.”
There was the mud and the official logo. After looking at it for a minute my mom spotted the impact abrasion from the hit. Also, it wasn’t some Dobbs foul ball or some Bloomquist foul ball. It was from Beltre foul ball!
An usher came down and gave me a card so I could write down the info to go with the ball. “So you don’t forget today” he said. How could I forget what today was? In fact, I had forgotten for several hours what the day was. It was eight years ago that I had met the love of my life. For a second there, I was not totally happy with the guy for reminding me. …But that is another story… And today is now special for another reason. Today I got a foul ball from a major league baseball game.
So that was my highlight from this game.
129:
The number announced hasn’t been a true turnstile count since the 1994 strike.
It hasn’t been a turnstile count for the AL since the late 70s. The NL switched to tickets sold in 1993, just in time for the Rockies to obliterate almost every attendance record.
And you want to talk about big crowds to watch a bad team… they had three 70,000+ crowds in ’93 to watch pre-clear Barry Bonds pound homer after homer into the left field stands. They averaged 65,000 or something like that for ALL the Cubs games that year. And the Rockies kept drawing well until 2002 or so, when the management had finally pissed off enough fans that the fans took their season ticket money and gave it to the Avs and Nuggets.
Between May and September the M’s are the only game in town, and it’s still relatively cheap to walk up and buy a couple of Saturday tickets. The Sonics and Seahawks, though, are starting to put a lot of pressure on the M’s casual fan base. They’ve already looted Husky football.
86 – Draft.
The easy solution is to let teams trade draft picks. Then, if I have the #1 pick, but I can’t afford to sing a #1 player, I trade the pick to a richer team. The better the draft talent, the mor value you get in the return for the pick.
Alternately, you can let teams trade players’ rights after drafting them, but before signing them, which amounts to the same thing.
This distributes the talent based on value, but transfers the burden of large signing bonuses to teams that can afford them.
#134: The reason behind the draft in the first place was to prevent the Yankees from signing all the good talent. If you allow teams to trade draft picks, how do you keep NYY from signing all the good talent? The luxury tax doesn’t apply to draft bonuses. Should we just ditch the draft?
No, the “easy solution” is to slot draft bonuses, so the teams and player know what they are going to be getting every year and the players can sign early and get on roster and get playing and teams know just what their costs are going be be each year in the draft based on where they finish.
Allowing agents and players the ability to hold teams hostage because, the player may not want to play in that system or wants a ridiculous sized bonus is what’s messing us the system.
The system was developed to allow the lower budget, crappier teams to acquire the top talent…..that’s how it should be.
Assign slot bonus amounts to every draft pick the problem is solved.
Lower budget crapy teams can then afford to draft the best talent available and teams finally get beyond paying ridiculous bonus amounts to unproven draft picks.
I’d like to hear comments on this from Finnegan’s catcher article today:
Padres general manager Kevin Towers asked for Borders in a trade, but was told he was not to be had.
“I just didn’t think Olivo would be available,” Towers said. “I thought Borders might be a guy they would talk about. But they said Borders was doing a good job of helping their young pitching. They said they would talk about Olivo. I was somewhat surprised, but I figured I might do my due diligence and find out why this guy might be available.”
Borders was DFA’d on July 29. The Olivo-Ojeda deal was announced July 31. So why would Bavasi have told Towers he wouldn’t let Borders go, when he was already gone before the Olivo trade was made? This doesn’t make any sense. But I don’t know whether to doubt Finnegan’s account, Towers’ truthfulness, or Bavasi’s sanity.
well, Finny was having pronoun trouble all through the article:
“Although they don’t shut down an opponent’s running game, Torrealba and Ojeda have exhibited sufficient arm strength. While not in Olivo’s class, both can throw out any runner if given a chance by the pitcher.
Both are rated pluses in the clubhouse.
“He moves around back there pretty well,” left-hander Jamie Moyer said. “He’s not afraid to let you know what he’s thinking, and I don’t recall shaking him off too much, which I appreciate and think any pitcher would.””
huh?
No no no. The Yankees have to give something up to get that #1 pick. Presumably a player who’s already been drafted and paid his bonus.
In a year with 2 really excellent prospects (like last year), the competition to trade for those top 2 picks would be huge. The Yankees can’t trade for the top pick all the time because then they’d never actually get to use the players they drafted.
Slotting robs the players of the right to negotiate. I hate the idea of taking away the rights of people who aren’t part of the deal.
What are the chances Bubela strikes out every plate appearance today?